santutthi

If the man who tells you that he writes, paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to the public, he lies; he lies if he puts his name to his writing, painting, statue, or song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a shadow of his spirit, something that may survive him…The man of letters who shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying rascal.

Everyone who writes, I have no doubt, would like to be famous, and not only famous now, while on this earth, but, embarrassing enough to admit given the odds, famous after he has departed the earth. And this, I believe, is true of serious and frivolous writers alike.

Well! I’m not a man of letters, of course; I’m just another vandal tagging the alleyways of the web with my digital graffiti. But as a paid-up member of the Frivolous Writers Local 301, I feel authoritative enough to declare that this is bunk. Unamuno may be talking about the literary equivalent of those ’90s rock stars who, having gone through all the considerable effort of forming a band, gigging regularly, signing to a major label, and heavily promoting their albums, proceeded to gripe incessantly about how stifling and inauthentic it all was. In those cases, yes, it’s hard to take such complaints seriously. If you don’t want fame and fortune, there are plenty of off-ramps to take long before you get to the big time. But why should it be so hard to accept the idea of the devoted amateur who loves his work precisely because it’s not a job with all the trappings and compromises that entails? I could probably adjust to being rich — certainly willing to give it my best effort! — but fame? What on Earth would be the point of that?

The dreadful fact is that there is no God. But what if there is a multitude of gods, small gods of small things, all the small things of the world?

What Horace is telling Leuconoe is this: everything that is needed lies at hand, if only we know how to taste and appreciate it. Spiritual sustenance comes from a winter view, the snow-whitened peak of a familiar mountain; from a beloved waterfall, with ilex growing from the rocks; from the apparent monotony of the sea’s waves; from wine, the great heartener and restorer of spirits; from friendship and conversation; and from love, so long as we do not expect too much from it or grab hold of it with too much vehemence. Horace’s way is the way of worshipping small things and small gods.

In our current populist-nationalist moment, there are a number of prominent voices announcing and praising the return of the strong gods. They would no doubt prefer the term “idols” for those Horatian miniatures, which they see as shallow pleasures appealing to hollow men. Others, like Peter Watson and Anthony Kronman, have each in their own way called for renewed attention to the transient things of this world in place of grand hopes of otherworldly salvation; Kronman even names his ideal “born-again paganism.” Who will turn out to be more prescient? Who knows? Let the ambitious ghost-hunters attempt to capture the zeitgeist in a narrative; I prefer the poetry of everyday visible life, expressed with haiku-like brevity. Quod satis est, said Horace. Santutthi paramam dhanam, said Buddha. Bonsai minimalism, said some insignificant blogger. Let it be enough.

But if I’m going to be honest the major attraction of this place is statistical dopamine- follower counts, views, likes, RTs. One of my average tweets gets more views than the the most viral blog post I’ve ever done, some tweets 30x.

Self-loathing Twitter is a consistently popular genre. But this candid admission is why, despite all the perfunctory flagellation, I don’t really think the sporadic “back to the blog” mutterings we’ve heard in recent months will ultimately amount to more than another type of status-signaling, sort of like the Day of Unplugging. People who want to be in the conversation but not of it will continue to use Twitter self-deprecatingly, allowing them to have it both ways, pretending to be above the attention and adulation they wallow in.

Dan Cohen says “ambient humanity” is what keeps people yoked to the giant platforms; I prefer to reiterate that people are always eager to avoid effort and agency, happy to drift down to the lowest common denominator while ironically lamenting their weakness. Quality, not quantity, right? I’m far more flattered by the fact that a few people silently show up here every day to see what I’ve written than I would be by thousands of likes, retweets and attaboys from people who just see me as one more ephemeral content provider to help them kill time at work. The satisfaction of a post well-written is its own reward, regardless of how much attention it gets. I always thought this was self-evident, but it turns out I’m just odd. Thank God for that.

It may be true that work on the assembly line dulls the faculties and empties the mind, the cure only being fewer hours of work at higher pay. But during fifty years as a workingman, I have found dull routine compatible with an active mind. I can still savor the joy I used to derive from the fact that while doing dull, repetitive work on the waterfront, I could talk with my partners and compose sentences in the back of my mind, all at the same time. Life seemed glorious. Chances are that had my work been of absorbing interest I could not have done any thinking and composing on the company’s time or even on my own time after returning from work.

People who find dull jobs unendurable are often dull people who do not know what to do with themselves when at leisure. Children and mature people thrive on dull routine, while the adolescent, who has lost the child’s capacity for concentration and is without the inner resources of the mature, needs excitement and novelty to stave off boredom.

Close your eyes and place your finger down just about anywhere on the web, and you’ll find some entitled dullard whining about the oppressiveness of work. In truth, it’s all projection, like the man said. I used to compose poems and posts in my head while driving down lonely highways in the middle of the night; now I do it while cutting the grass or processing and shipping merchandise for clients. All the money and free time in the world won’t help people who are fundamentally empty and lazy.

Have I missed much by spending my life with barely literate people? I need intellectual isolation to work out my ideas. I get my stimulation from both the world of books and the book of the world. I cannot see how living with educated, articulate people, skilled in argument, would have helped me develop my ideas.

A friend of my stepson’s once came by the house to visit him while I was out. He knew me from a job where we briefly worked together, but only as an acquaintance. I laughed to hear that he was gobsmacked upon seeing all my books, especially as he’s a fairly serious reader himself. He told my stepson that I was an enigma. “What’s he doing here?” he asked, meaning, here in a small town, living a nondescript life. Apparently I should be someone important in a big city if I read this much. I recently heard that he’d taken to calling me the “Wizard” and the “Pagemaster,” in reference to some ’90s movie starring Macaulay Culkin, and telling people that I live in a library (I haven’t seen the film, but still, I think that might just be my favorite compliment of all time).

That’s the benefit of low expectations, of course. If people don’t see you as much more than a truck driver or a janitor, they’re overly impressed by any ways in which you defy the stereotype. The flipside to that, though, is wondering why you should be content to exist below your potential. It’s a reflexive assumption that any talents or interests one might have should be maximized and monetized. I, in turn, have said repeatedly, ever since I started writing, that this is just another one of the many ways in which we surrender our agency and let the conventional wisdom do our thinking for us. Had I taken the path of least resistance and “risen” to my potential as defined by parents, teachers, and aptitude tests, I would have probably been just another unhappy face in the crowd of failed writers, like a couple academic friends of mine. By remaining undeveloped, unpolished and unfinished, I’ve preserved the freedom and space to grow at my own pace for my own reasons, and that has been far more satisfying than reaching for the stars would have been.

No man is an intellectual island, obviously. I’ve benefitted greatly from having a few highly-educated friends and pen pals, and the Internet provides constant exposure to smarter thinkers and better writers. Still, there is something about living an ordinary life among regular folks that serves as the necessary ballast to keep from floating off into the cerebral clouds where so many ambitious, educated people get lost.

I think I’ve just about reached breaking point. Whatever fun is left from the spectacle of football – which still brings me great joy, and is rarely bettered than Liverpool’s first goal at Watford – is lost in the maelstrom of hate, negativity and just downright nastiness. It’s spiteful, immature and depressing, with spoilt brats seemingly incapable of handling their team drawing a football match. Mostly it comes from men, many of whom may also be fully grown.

Warning: there will be rambling. And foul language (nuns and priests, click off now). And it may take up 30 minutes of your time. There will be a look at Liverpool’s current predicament, but also my (latest) despair on how general football discourse is going, and how everything gets skewed by fury.

…Remember, remember: the more you want and need something, the more you grasp for it, and the more your world dissolves when you don’t have it. Because, if you need it, then you are in a state of “lacking”. Only wins, or the title, can remove the sense of unworthiness, which spreads around Twitter due to the constant “banter”, in the echo-chamber, and in the way misery loves company.

He may sound like an aspiring Buddhist who hasn’t quite got the knack of keeping his equanimous poise, but Tomkins is just a long-time journalist and a diehard fan of Liverpool FC who has arrived at a conclusion already occupied by many others: social media makes everything worse, even — or especially — the things you love.

My father once asked if I regretted not pursuing a philosophy degree. I laughed it off by noting that my former professor lived in a townhouse and drove a Ford Pinto, and I had already achieved that level of success without the crushing debt of graduate school on top of it. I was being jocoserious, of course; a lack of passion for teaching, rather than a fear of debt, was the reason for that particular road not taken. But even had I pursued something like what Damon Linker described — a humble existence as a teaching professor at a small liberal-arts school — I doubt I’d be happier than I am now as an autodidact and anonymuncule. I knew when to stop, and that has made all the difference.

Like a sideways-8 infinity symbol, the dogged pursuit of happiness often seems to wind around and turn back upon itself. It seems perfectly logical — what could be more fulfilling than a job that requires a complete focus on your favorite sport and your favorite club and pays you to write about them? What could be better than doing so in the company of countless other people who also share your passion? And yet, we always forget — those same people love to complain incessantly. They love to pick fights over nothing. They love caviling and kibitzing even when they have nothing valuable to add. And social media amplifies, magnifies and intensifies all the negativity to the point where even a Buddhist master would struggle to avoid being dispirited by it all. Maybe, like George Carlin joked, the answer is to ignore your team when they’re doing poorly, and only jump back on the bandwagon when they’re winning again. Life gives you more than enough opportunities to build character through suffering; it seems perversely masochistic to turn a beloved hobby into yet another one.

I’m a bit worried these days by how little I have, or care, to say. Other people’s words don’t hold much interest either. It feels ridiculous that we should be required to have opinions and perspectives, or that we should need to express them. These days I avoid conversation. I switch off the television and radio and wonder why we can’t be content, like Bertie Wooster in Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, to “just exist beautifully.” How different – how better –things would be if we could only dial down (by fifty percent, say) the chatty sociability of the species.

I recently read Massimo Pigliucci’s book How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life. I was pretty sure I wasn’t an unconscious or incipient Stoic, but it’s good to reassess these things every so often. Still, to what would surely be the good professor’s chagrin, all this did was reaffirm that I am indeed still the Epicurean I always thought I was. Good friendships, clear thinking, modest desires, intellectual pleasures, gods in name only, and most crucially — or most damningly from a Stoic perspective — a preference for withdrawal from social and political life. Those who espouse “living unknown” as a maxim will always be offensive in the sight of those who believe in performing duty and signaling virtue. “Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.” Pretty much. Still, I reserve the right to hold myself aloof from the fray.

A visit to any pub or bar will confirm the truth of what Dr. Johnson says. There you will find people who seem to be party to the most secret of secret state policy, though they appear to work in humble capacities in local businesses, or who are unalterably convinced of the motives of people in authority whom they have never met and about whom they know practically nothing. Needless to say, I do not exclude myself from this class of know-all: I am exactly the same.

It’s not just serious topics like politics, though. Even while browsing the Liverpool FC subreddit, for example, I’m constantly amazed at people’s ability to quickly turn gaseous speculation into granite conviction. Guys who couldn’t successfully manage a local McDonald’s franchise seem to know better than billionaire owners how the club’s business should be run. Fellows who couldn’t coach a team of eight year-olds are founts of insider information and advice on strategy that professional managers are apparently too blind or stupid to see. Direct communication often manages to devolve into a game of Telephone as it is, with the participants reacting to subtext (both real and imagined) as much as the actual words spoken, but these fans are like people standing outside the window with their ears pressed to the glass, trying to participate in the conversation based on the snippets and fragments they’re able to catch. The absurdity would be comical were it not for how seriously they take it.

I find that as humility permits my conversation to extend only as far as its leash of ignorance will reach, my walks around the Internet are much more peaceful and enjoyable. “I don’t know, and I don’t need to know” may not stir the blood and quicken the pulse, but as far as slogans go, I have yet to find one more liberating.

A bad cold kept me from doing anything yesterday, so I sat and read a couple collections of Orwell’s essays. Superb stuff all around, but I had to admit that I resembled some of his remarks on Charles Dickens:

I could do without the horde of children, and I prefer to do my own chores rather than rely on servants, but quibbling details aside, yes, this sounds like an acceptable deal to me. Home life is always enough, indeed. Forever in a kind of love and forever in a kind of selfishness and self-enjoyment, you might say. Pace Orwell, I don’t see anything contradictory about combining purposelessness and vitality. “Purposelessness” doesn’t mean that you sit around in a vegetative state; it simply means that you’re capable of generating depth and meaning from within an outwardly simple, ordinary life. I’m never bored, and I’ve always got things to do (with not enough time to do them in). It’s just that none of those things would be impressive to anyone else. My life is like a bonsai tree — insignificant by your standards, a wealth of meaningful details by mine.

“If you wish to improve,” Epictetus once said, “be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.” One of the most powerful things we can do as a human being in our hyperconnected, 24/7 media world is say: “I don’t know.” Or, more provocatively: “I don’t care.” Not about everything of course—just most things. Because most things don’t matter, and most news stories aren’t worth tracking.

It’s a trade off of deliberate ignorance for the ability to prioritize and see with clarity.

Thoreau acerbically noted that for all the eagerness to construct a telegraph to bring news across the ocean, the first bit of information to arrive might likely be nothing more than the nineteenth-century equivalent of celebrity gossip. Nowadays, I’m sure there are brilliant minds working hard to figure out how we can implant SIM cards in our frontal lobes so that we can keep up with the Kardashians without having to go to all the exhausting labor of manipulating our pocket computers with our fingers, like savages. But even “serious” news and information is often nothing of the sort. It exists to keep people perpetually agitated, not informed. The skewed incentives of nonstop cable news and social media reward rumors, trivia and useless opinions as much as, if not more than, reporting that any of us could actually use to make a practical difference in our lives. Like a bewildered librarian in Colchester, most of us are confronted daily with information we will not, cannot, apply in any meaningful way to our own routine.

In chapters 47 and 80 of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu suggested that contentment and knowledge could be attained without being curious enough to visit a neighboring country, indeed, without even needing to leave one’s house or look out the window. I suspect a bit of literary license being taken here, some poetic exaggeration, as was often the case with these old mystical parables. (I mean, really; who has ever had a plank or beam in their eye? A man with even a small wood chip in his eye would probably have far more pressing concerns than sanctimoniously lecturing others. But I digress.)

Yesterday, while hiking in the national forest, to which I am fortunate to live adjacent, I took notice of a couple unusual lichens I hadn’t noticed before. At home, I spent a little time trying to count how many different birds came to the feeder. It crossed my mind that even trying to become enough of an amateur naturalist to be knowledgeable about the flora and fauna around here could be a years-long project. That, I imagine, is the spirit of Lao Tzu’s assertion. In a world that frantically urges me to care about the newer, the faster, the popular, and the maximum quantity, I could easily live out my remaining years wandering mountain trails and returning home to old books without ever being bored, let alone missing out on much of importance.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.